The historical diffusion of lexical and grammatical features from one pidgin to another has been well documented for the Pacific region, particularly by Baker (1993) who argued that items were spread individually in the early nineteenth century via an ad hoc foreigner talk register. Noting the profound similarities between Hawai'i Creole English (HCE) and the Caribbean English Creoles (CECs) which led Bickerton (1981) to propose the language bioprogram hypothesis, Goodman (1985) suggested a stronger model of diffusion, one which involved the transmission of a structurally complex pidgin or creole from the Caribbean to Hawai'i. Holm (1986) and Dillard (1995) have endorsed Goodman's hypothesis. This study, drawing on a wealth of pidgin/creole data spanning the previous two centuries, finds little support for Goodman's proposal. Textual evidence shows that the nineteenth-century pidgin of Hawai'i lacked not only the structure of later HCE but also displayed far stronger links with neighboring Pacific pidgin Englishes than the CECs. Furthermore, the creole TMA system and for -complementation patterns are revealed to have developed late and primarily (though not entirely) within the population of native-born speakers, as predicted by the bioprogram. However, while the pace of creolization was fairly rapid in Hawai'i, HCE did not form entirely within a single generation.

It is commonly accepted that the process of pidginization leads to a loss of inflectional morphology, but this loss is often not total. Lexifier inflections instead follow a cline of reduction: full retention -partial retention -partial lexicalization -full lexicalization -full loss. This article examines the retention of inflection in 29 languages that reflect a history of pidginization in their devel

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